Should’ve done this much sooner.

And by “this” I mean WordPress. In truth I’ve been putting off creating this site for over a year. Originally I used Tumblr for my site. That was largely because I already knew how to use it from prior work with it.

Here’s an image of how that worked out for posterity, as most of it will be wiped once I’ve finished transplanting everything over here (it’s going to stay around as I still use Tumblr a lot; just it won’t be my main website).

It worked… Kinda. Basically I had the blog as the front page, and sub-pages for each book, as well as an About, Bio… The usual stuff. Even so, it was unwieldy. Tumblr’s very selective about what it will and won’t do with HTML; you have to work in its very crude editor and you don’t really know what will work until you hit “preview”. I had to use tables for all of my layouts, ending up with stuff that looked different in different browsers or on mobile devices, and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I think if you were a real web design expert you could probably do a lot with its custom HTML option, but I don’t have the time to learn what I’d need to know from scratch when stuff like WordPress exists. There were also things that were genuinely impossible to fix; for instance Tumblr text posts always output images at a set size; you can’t get them to stretch to the width of the post (unless the width is the correct size already) and Tumblr’s default is quite narrow.

In the end though, the Tumblr site was too “busy”. Ultimately I couldn’t get the landing pages up to the standard that I wanted. I’m much happier with the current ones, like this.

I’ve also heard that Tumblr is really bad for SEO. I’m not sure about that, because I don’t know much about SEO (other than the basics), but I’ve been assured that this solution will work better even out-of-the-box. Who knows, though; I guess I’ll find out soon.

Now I’m just waiting for some images I’ve commissioned and then I’ll transfer the URLs over, after which this is pretty much “done” and I can get back to focusing on writing!

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